In today's competitive business environment, it is a fundamental business principle that to be successful, advertisers, marketers, and business concerns must determine the likes and dislikes of the general public. It is especially crucial in today's global, highly competitive marketplace that businesses have timely and accurate information regarding the public's preferences and especially the public's reaction to a business' products and services. Consumer market research is a multi-billion dollar industry in America.
This fundamental business principle is greatly amplified in the radio and television broadcasting and advertising industries. The life-blood of commercial radio and television broadcast stations is advertising revenues. And, success of advertisers and advertising agencies depends in large part on their ability to target their advertising messages to as large an interested audience as possible without breaking their advertising budgets. Therefore, in the advertising and radio and television business worlds, determining timely and accurate demographics and program preferences of listeners and viewers is essential to running successful advertising and broadcasting businesses.
There are currently a few large companies that gather radio listener and television viewer market survey data and other information, rank radio and television broadcast stations based on listenership or viewership share in a particular broadcast market and sell the said market survey data and other information to radio and television broadcast companies, advertisers, advertising agencies and others. This business or industry is often referred to as the radio or television “ratings” business. Arbitron, Inc. of New York, N.Y. (“Arbitron”) dominates the radio ratings industry. Neilsen Media Research, also located in New York, N.Y., dominates the television ratings business. “Markets” are generally expressed in geographic terms and it is not unusual for a radio or television broadcast station to be in more than one “market” at a time.
Having accurate and timely market survey data and information and using said data to predict how many people are expected to be listening to a particular radio or television station, at a particular time and to particular programming and said listeners' demographics (i.e., their ages, gender, ethnicity, occupations, etc.) bear directly on the types of advertisers, advertising content and the price an advertiser is willing to pay for a particular advertising “spot” during program airing on a particular radio or television broadcast station. This dynamic, of course, impacts the amount a radio and television broadcast company can reasonably expect to charge advertisers for particular advertising spots and, in turn, the amount of advertising revenues said radio and television broadcast company can expect to make. These numbers can be vastly different depending on the facts. For example, during the NFL Super Bowl broadcast in recent years, the television network carrying the Super Bowl game charged millions of dollars a minute for air time for advertisers. On the other hand, a low power, independent radio station in rural America with a few thousand listeners might get fifty dollars for airing a one minute commercial spot.
The radio and television “ratings” business has an enormous impact on radio and television broadcast companies, large and small. Poor “ratings” (i.e., low listenership or viewership compared to other radio and television broadcast stations in a particular market, as determined by a ratings company like Arbitron) for its programming may actually put a radio or television station out of business, as again, advertising revenues for commercial broadcast stations are their life-blood and are tied to these “ratings. As such, the timeliness, accuracy and reliability of listenership, viewership and demographic data are of super-critical importance to radio and television broadcasters and their advertiser-customers.
Especially large, corporate broadcast companies like Clear Channel Communications, Inc. of San Antonio, Tex., which owns hundreds of radio and television stations across America, have complained publicly and bitterly for many years about the highly untimely (i.e., quarterly reports) and inaccurate data and the exorbitant cost of obtaining radio listener data from Arbitron. Arbitron is currently the leading radio monitoring company (essentially a de facto monopoly) which offers a radio listener statistical gathering and reporting service (i.e., a radio station ratings service).
Advertising executives who advertise on radio have lately exerted a significant amount of energy searching for a more timely, more accurate and more detailed information source to guide their marketing investments, which investments amount to many billions of dollars in expenditures each year to radio and television broadcasters.
Radio and television station owners and executives are in the same search for better information to guide their programming and on-air talent scheduling decisions. Generally speaking, the more people who listen to and view a particular radio or television station's programming, the bigger the piece of the advertising dollar pie in its market said radio or television station will receive. Advertisers and advertising agencies carefully review data on the number of listeners and their demographics of individual radio and television stations and their programming and make decisions based on this data on where and when to place their advertising dollars.
An automated, interactive system that comprehensively monitors radio and television broadcasts in each radio and television broadcast market and determines in a timely, verifiable, statistically significant and accurate manner (i) the relative levels of listenership and viewership of each radio and television station in said markets on a real-time basis, (ii) whether someone is actually listening to or viewing a radio or television broadcast and (iii) also gathers demographic and other useful information and data from radio listeners and television viewers on a real time basis, has not previously existed. The invention changes all that.
Nor has a system existed prior to the invention that utilizes ordinary, unmodified telephones, including wireless cell phones as a receiving and recording device for data on said radio listenership and television viewership and demographics, as does the invention.
As discussed further herein below, others who recognize the current severe shortcomings in the radio and television ratings business, including Arbitron, itself, have set out on a course to invent new ways to capture radio listenership and television viewership data and habits with expensive, custom designed and specially manufactured electronic devices, which in all cases but one we are aware of, have no other useful function but to monitor radio or television signals. The proponents of some of these devices expect them to be worn or carried around by radio listeners, despite having no other useful purpose.
The expense to develop, test and mass produce said specialized electronic devices and other signal encoding equipment that must be employed under some proposals by radio and television broadcast stations for said specialized electronic devices to work, will increase the expense of obtaining ratings data by end-users, exponentially.
Utilizing unmodified, ordinary telephones, including ubiquitous, wireless cell phones, as the invention does, to capture needed data will save radio and television companies and advertisers millions of dollars in the capital investment, operations and research expenses that would otherwise be needed to develop, test and mass produce said specialized electronic devices. These expenses are passed along to said radio and television broadcast companies and advertisers in the fees they are charged for ratings data.
Unlike the invention, and despite the great expense of other proposals that use specialized electronic devices, none of said specialized electronic devices can detect whether or not a radio listener or television viewer is actually listening to radio or viewing television programming that is detected by said specialized electronic device. And, if a radio listener or television viewer actually is listening to or viewing said detected radio and television programming, said specialized electronic devices are unable to determine and the duration of said radio listening and television viewing.
Unlike the invention, and despite the great expense of other proposals that use specialized electronic devices, none of said specialized electronic devices can detect demographic information such as the age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, etc., of the actual radio listeners and television viewers whose radio listening and television viewing activities are purportedly captured by said specialized electronic devices.
The vast majority of Americans over 12 years of age carry wireless cell phones wherever they go, including in the car, to work, to school, on vacation and even on the beach. Today, wireless cell phones double as personal data assistants (PDAs), digital cameras, recorders, music players, video players, Internet access, email and text messaging devices, etc. Wireless cell phones have become indispensable for all age groups, albeit for difference reasons. Human behavior dictates that specialized electronic devices, with no other useful purpose or function, will be left at home in a drawer.
Therefore, given the above described state of affairs in the radio and television ratings industry, and the serious short-comings of other current and proposed systems and proposals, as described in further detail herein below, what is needed in is a more affordable, real-time system for obtaining, monitoring, recording, verifying and reporting radio listener and television viewer programming preferences, demographic data on said radio listeners and television viewers, and other information and data useful and necessary to the radio and television broadcast and advertising industries and others. The invention does all of this.
Arbitron currently “rates” radio broadcasts based on the listening audience (i.e., number of listeners) tuned into a particular radio station and releases this data on a quarterly basis. This rating, unlike ratings services for television broadcast done by Nielsen Media Research, Inc. of New York, N.Y., is not done in real time. Over the past fifty years, the conventional (Arbitron) method of providing these statistics is from a network of paper diaries maintained by thousands of listeners in certain radio markets across the United States.
More specifically, the current Arbitron process collects paper questionnaires via a purportedly random sampling of listeners in a radio broadcast market. Thus, for a given market, a certain percentage of the population is randomly selected and called. The calls are purportedly generated by random telephone number dialing. Those persons who are contacted via the telephone are then asked if they are willing to participate in the Arbitron diary process. If the person agrees, Arbitron then sends that person a paper diary. The diary consists of three types of questions: (1) What did you listen to? (2) When did you listen to it? (3) Where were you when you listened to it? The participants are asked to collect this information and write it down in the provided diary over a seven-day period. At the end of that seven-day period, the diary is supposed to be sent back to Arbitron. This process is repeated until Arbitron determines a statistically relevant number of diaries have been collected in the given market.
Many in the radio industry view the Arbitron paper system as outdated and inadequate. This is because this system's output lacks depth and has a many months-long lag time for generating reports. The Arbitron paper process is also vulnerable to bias and fraud. That is, if a participant prefers a specific station, they (intentionally or unintentionally) may fill the diary in a way that favors that particularly radio station. Further, if a person with fraudulent intentions obtains one or more diaries and skews them towards a particular station, this compromises the statistical integrity of the process. Despite these current limitations, radio broadcasters and other subscribers for listener statistics continue to use the flawed Arbitron system because alternative rating services are not available.
In an attempt to overcome the above-described shortcomings, Arbitron has recently developed and is currently testing a “Portable People Meter” (PPM) system. The PPM is a pager-sized device that is worn or carried by survey participants throughout the day to collect radio listening statistics. The PPM, however, still faces several shortcomings such as lack of in-depth information recorded, contaminated data due to stray broadcast signals, expense of installing PPM signal embedding devices in multiple broadcast points, the inability to distinguish between those listening and those merely hearing a broadcast and skewed data due to unsightly visual presence of the PPM device on survey participants. Another shortcoming is that the PPM system's statistical integrity depends on survey participants actually wearing, activating, and periodically returning the PPM device to a base cradle to upload its stored information and re-charge its batteries. To date, the PPM system has not been embraced by the radio and advertising industries, including for reasons stated herein below.
Further, apparatus to monitor the identity of a selected radio station within a vehicle are known to exist. These apparatus typically employ one of two methods for detecting the identity of a tuned-in radio station. One method, known as a “sniffer” method, involves tuning the receiver to the local radio phase lock loop (PLL) and then calculating the tuned frequency by knowing the intermediate frequency (IF). The second method, known as a “comparator” method, involves comparing output audio signals from the speaker port to a (known) reference audio signal (i.e., a pre-selected radio station). Then, if the two signals are in phase, the tuned radio station can be identified. Both methods, however, suffer from shortcomings.
The “sniffer” method's shortcomings include the fact that different radio manufacturers have different IF frequencies (i.e., there are no standards for IF frequencies), and that some radio manufacturers do not have local PLL for AM radio stations, which makes them impossible to measure. The comparator method's shortcomings include the fact that it takes too much time (i.e., typically ten seconds or more) to find the selected station—which is disadvantageous if the vehicle's occupants have subsequently changed stations again.
Another proposal has been advanced by a joint venture between Media Audit of Houston, Tex. and Ipsos of the U.K. Their approach uses Ipsos' so-called “smart phone” which records media exposure by tracking water-marked-encoded signals.
The details of Media Audit/Ipsos approach are not available but it is evident that Media Audit/Ipsos approach's greatest draw back is the huge capital investment needed for manufacturing special, “smart phones” and hardware at broadcast studios to encode signals. That approach has no listener interaction and no way to determine whether a radio or television source is merely being monitored or actually being listened to. Moreover the encoding approach is untested and believed to be unreliable today. The smart phone will also suffer from some of the same drawbacks present with the Arbitron PPM as encoded signals are used. That is conclusion from media reports of field testing of the Media Audit/Ipsos “smart phone” in the United Kingdom which were less than favorable.
In September 2006 Nielson Media Research, known for its dominance in the television ratings market, announced it will test its cell phone attached “go-meter” and plans to compete with Arbitron and Media Audit/Ipsos in the radio ratings market. The “go-meter” was originally designed to measure out-of-home television viewing.
One shortcoming of all other competing approaches to the invention, including the approach to television ratings used by Nielsen Media Research of New York, N.Y., and the Nielson “go-meter” is that they all require large capital investments for specially manufactured equipment, undoubtedly driving the cost of the needed listenership and viewership information beyond the reach of smaller radio and television broadcasters. Indeed, Arbitron has already announced its PPM will result in significantly more expensive market data costs to its customers. The invention, on the other hand, utilizes ordinary telephones, including ordinary, unmodified wireless cell phones and will result in significant cost reductions over the current and proposed methodologies and systems in use by Arbitron and all other known radio or television ratings services.
The market coverage for some competing approaches to the invention is limited to the geographic locations in which any required specially manufactured equipment has been deployed, especially if encoding equipment must be deployed at the radio or television station broadcast site. The telephone, including the wireless cell phone utilized with the invention is ubiquitous and used everywhere. Existing, prolific, nationwide wireless cell phone usage means rapid demographic outreach in any and all markets using the invention.
Moreover, the approaches that use encoding of signals in a particular market may not be able to truly obtain full market survey coverage in broadcast markets where, for example, clear channel, 50 KW am stations hundreds of miles away from listeners also service said particular market or in the case smaller broadcasters who may not be able to afford the encoding technology or choose not to utilize the particular encoding approach utilized by a ratings company.
Ordinary people will not routinely bring objects like the Arbitron PPM, which has no other useful purpose, with them when they leave their homes. On the other hand, in today's world, ordinary people (children and adults alike) bring ordinary, wireless cell phones everywhere, including to work, on vacation and even to the beach. These same unmodified wireless cell phones routinely now include Internet access, text messaging, emails, audio and video players, digital cameras, PDAs and more. The Nielsen Media Research system does not provide for capturing viewership data for television audiences outside their own homes. In our mobile society and with portable televisions, a segment of the market is totally missed.
The invention provides real time data unlike the Arbitron PPM which requires delivery of the information via the Internet if and when the PPM carrier takes the time to do it. On the other hand, the invention can provide listener and viewer reaction to specific on-air events or marketing campaigns that can be made available to advertisers and business concerns shortly after (or for longer duration broadcast events even during) the broadcast. The invention is capable of providing precise real time data collection which would allow for specific broadcast events, like the NFL Super Bowl to be monitored giving advertising and broadcast executives the ability to make advertising content decisions while on the air using near real time data from the invention.
As mentioned above, the said “sniffer” method's shortcomings include the fact that different radio manufacturers have different IF frequencies (i.e., there are no standards for IF frequencies), and that some radio manufacturers do not have local PLL for AM radio stations, which makes them impossible to measure. The comparator method's shortcomings include the fact that it takes too much time (i.e., typically ten seconds or more) to find the selected station—which is disadvantageous if the vehicle's occupants have subsequently changed stations again.
None of the other approaches can, as the invention does, determine whether the radio listener or television viewer is actually listening to or viewing the programming as opposed to merely hearing it. Moreover, some devices like the PPM may be placed near a radio or the Nielsen Media Research apparatus near a television set and left to record while no one is even in the room or at home.
Unlike the other approaches, the invention provides a reliable mechanism to determine and record duration of radio listener and television viewer attention to broadcasts, while the unattended PPM, or Nielsen Media Research apparatus, for example, give a distorted picture of listening or viewing and duration of listening or viewing depending upon the facts and circumstances. Unlike the other approaches, the invention functions in all cases with human interaction. The unattended PPM or Neilsen Media Research apparatus can give false measurements of true radio listening or television viewing, respectively, with no person being present.
Unlike the other approaches, the invention provides full analog and/or digital programming audio and computer data recording and storage available for future use and verification or for any other purposes at anytime, insuring accountability and transparency of the data and the data gathering process.
Unlike the other approaches such as the Arbitron PPM, the invention is not susceptible to signal corruption as are single-source encoded RF signals.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide for the first time, accurate, verifiable, reliable and meaningful market survey data and information regarding radio listenership and television viewership preferences and habits, and demographics, acquired on a real time basis, to advertising agencies, advertisers, radio and television broadcast companies and others needing this kind of accurate and meaningful market data and other information.
It is another object of the invention to provide relevant market data to those who need and rely on this data on a much more affordable basis than is currently available or is proposed by others.
It is another object of the invention to eliminate the large capital expenditures involved with the designing and manufacture of specialized electronic devices, specially equipped or modified cell phones and the encoding and other equipment needed to be installed at broadcast facilities in order to utilize the other proposed, so-called “solutions.”
It is another object of the invention to eliminate the waste of resources and time that will occur when competing encoding and other technologies vie to be the standard. No special technology is needed to obtain a better end product by using the invention.
It is another object of the invention to reduce the general business expenses and costs of a “radio or television ratings” company by eliminating most of manual labor and taking advantage of available computer technology and automation.
It is another object of the invention to increase dramatically the size of the data pool using mass calling and computer technology thereby making retrieved data and other information more meaningful and useful, statistically and otherwise. By utilizing ordinary telephones, including ordinary, ubiquitous wireless cell phones carried by most Americans over the age of 12, essentially everywhere they go; the universe of those participating in market surveys is increased very dramatically.
It is another object of the invention to increase dramatically the value of the data to end-users. By being able to identify not only whether someone is listening to a particular radio program or viewing a particular television program at a particular time, but also their age, gender, ethnicity, occupation, etc., the value of the data to end-users is magnified dramatically.
It is another object of the invention to allow for specialized or targeted market research studies, as data gathering, automated telephone calls can be directed to specific markets, age groups, genders, ethnic groups, occupation groups, etc.
It is another object of the invention to provide a service that would allow for advertising decisions to be made in a near real time dimension to allow decisions to be made by radio and television broadcasters and advertisers even while the affected programming is being aired.